


and in my chains i saw us running

by justfine



Category: 1917 (Movie 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, Post-World War I, Roman Catholicism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:28:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23706916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justfine/pseuds/justfine
Summary: The man turned his head towards the window flooding the room with light. Tom watched the way the sunshine settled on the apple of his cheek and cleared his throat. It was obscene, he thought, to look such a way.(or, Tom gets a job as a groundskeeper on the Schofields' estate.)
Relationships: Tom Blake/William Schofield
Comments: 27
Kudos: 110





	and in my chains i saw us running

"Let men be men, that is to say, weak, vain, inconstant, unjust, false, and presumptuous;

let the world be the world still; you cannot prevent it."

— François Fénelon

*

Thomas Blake was standing in front of the altarpiece of the Assumption of Mary when he heard his brother’s voice. It had that sleepy, soothing tone that was so familiar. “—and I needn’t have dragged you in kicking and screaming,” he was saying, stopping with his footsteps. He turned towards the sacristy from which his brother Joseph had appeared. He looked as he always did, dressed in black, serene and neatly shaven, the candlelight glittering in his eyes.

“Father Blake,” he said, “it’s nice to see you.”

Joseph moved towards him, said, “Give it a rest, Tom,” and met him chest-to-chest with his usual, tender embrace. Cradling the back of his head, he planted a kiss to his hairline as he tucked him into himself close. “It’s nice to see you, too,” he told him, swaying him as a mother might rock a child. Eventually, he pulled back but did not let go. “I’ve missed you.”

Tom took his brother’s hands from his shoulders and held them tightly in his own before they parted.

They did not stay long in the church. Joseph had, as he had promised in his letters, purchased a tin of custard powder and sugar with his pittance of an allowance. He led the way back to the priory; a small, pink stone cottage that he shared with the parish priest. It took no more than a minute’s walk before the incense from the church became the sweet, heady smell of the climbing honeysuckle that had besieged the front of the house. Tom breathed in deep, filling his lungs. For a moment he thought he could taste it.

The custard was made as it had always been; Tom mixing together the powder, sugar and two tablespoons of milk as Joseph watched over the milk on the stove. He worked it into a paste until it was time to pour it into the simmering milk.

“Do you know much about them Schofields?” he asked.

The Schofields, as Tom had found out, were the family on who’s estate he would be working. The barman he had spoken to, who had been given the keys to the lodge by the former groundskeeper, had said nothing of them when he asked. Whether this was ominous or a testament to their privacy, he wasn’t quite sure.

Joseph stood tentative over the custard. “They’re not parishioners of ours,” he told him with a shrug, “but I know the father, George Schofield, he’s the owner of that firm that makes those—oh, you know, the thing they use to make cloth.”

“A loom?” he supplied.

“Yes, those.” He gave the pot a stir. “Open the tinned pears, Tom, this is looking about done.”

They ate in the parlour. It was painted purple and the ceiling was stained with tobacco. Joseph opened a window before he sat, aware of the smell. The parish priest, Father Leslie, was a big smoker and an even bigger drinker. Joseph, as he always did, spoke without accusation. Tom hummed at his chatter, trying to enjoy the company of his brother while shrinking away from the painting of the murder of St. Thomas that hung just over his shoulder.

He had never enjoyed the story of his namesake’s martyrdom, how he’d been stabbed to death in a foreign land.

With effort, he shifted his attention back to Joseph. For much of his adolescence, the priesthood, and then the Great War, had robbed him of his brother. Tom did not know what had happened. It was not as though he had lost his brother, but as if he had been stolen and returned to him as someone slightly different each time. The war had barely given him back at all, Tom thought, gaze resting on the juncture between Joseph’s cheek and neck, where the skin there seemed held together by scar tissue. He knew from visits to the hospital that the entirety of the left side of his abdomen and arm looked much the same.

“Tom,” Joseph said gently, adjusting his clerical collar, “it’s not polite to stare.”

Tom sank into his seat and guilt, finding them both uncomfortable. He cleared his throat. He had finished his pears and custard, but Joseph had not. It sat on the table before them. He did not have to ask for it before his brother gestured for him to take it.

“You will keep yourself out of trouble, won’t you?” Joseph asked him then.

It was concern, not the complete underestimation of his character, that prompted this question from Joseph. Tom knew this, but it stirred a petulance inside of him that made the last of his custard hard to swallow.

“’Course, Joe,” he said. “You won’t hear any trouble from me.”

*

The next morning, Tom awoke to the stillness of the cottage.

It was alright, he thought, as he dressed in his clothes from the day before. The stonework was exposed, the furniture mismatched. His mattress was kept from the ground by wooden pallets and a line of rope ran diagonally from one hook to another as a make-do washing line close by the fireplace. The leaded windows didn’t let in _much_ of a draught.

Mr Sanders, the former groundskeeper, had left him a list of his duties. Tom dug the piece of paper from his pocket. It was all standard stuff, everyday starting with a check of the grounds. He took a peak outside to inspect the weather and found a perfect May dawn, the sun already shining through the budding trees without the heaviness of the summer heat. He would set off soon, he told himself, but only after breakfast.

The Old Kinross estate, which had been in the Schofield family for some two-hundred years, spanned almost four-hundred and eighty acres. Tom had been told as much by the head gardener, a Mr Smith, who lived in the lodge by the entrance gate piers. It had taken him ten minutes of wandering to find his own dwellings from there, and the house, Mr Smith had said, was another ten minutes south-west. “Five,” he had added, “if you’re willing to bet yourself against the cows in the field.” In the cold light of day, eyes on the beasts over the fence, Tom reckoned he’d just stick to the path.

The path from his cottage, he found, led straight to the back of the house. From the outside, it didn’t look particularly magnificent. It seemed austere and unassuming, just a large grey box of seven bays wide and three storeys high.

He walked down the gravel decline. By the doors that led downwards, were two women smoking. One was older, around his mother’s age, with ruddy cheeks and red curly hair coming out from under her hat. The other could be no older than he was, slim and mouse-like in the way she stood. By their dress, Tom assumed they worked in the kitchen.

“And who might you be?” called the older one.

Tom sauntered closer, stopping under the shade. “Thomas Blake, ma’am. I’m the new groundskeeper.”

“Bit young for that, are you not?”

“It’s a young man’s game, this lark,” he said.

“Aye, I suppose such a job would need a big strapping lad like yourself,” said the other woman, making Tom’s cheeks colour. She stood from where she sat and offered out a hand. He took it. “Jean McBride. This is Mrs Rowe,” she added, gesturing behind herself. “You’ve found everything well?”

He nodded.

“Just doing my rounds now.”

“Then we won’t keep you,” Mrs Rowe said, getting to her feet and dusting herself down. “Do pop along for your lunch, though. Mr Sanders usually collected his sandwiches around two.”

Tom grinned and said his goodbyes, promising to return for his lunch. He walked back up the gravel path and continued his walk along the walled parameter of the house. To one side was a garden pavilion, and to the other a square terrace that led down to a parterre garden formed of clipped hedges filled with bedding plants. Mr Smith clearly took great pride in his work, he thought, coming to a stop again on the neat, grassy foreyard.

The house, Tom decided as he craned his neck, was no grander from the front.

*

The following weekend, Tom went to see Joseph, but he wasn’t at the priory.

“He’s away to see a man about a dog,” Father Leslie told him, then frowned. “Or a magistrate about the practical difficulties for the provision of Mass in the local lunatic asylum. I can’t remember. I wasn’t listening.”

Tom was certain his brother wouldn’t have said _that_ , but he said nothing of it.

“Do you know when he’ll be back?” he asked.

Father Leslie took a flask from his cassock and took a deep drink. “Who’s asking?” Whatever he had drunk was strong on his breath. “Are you Tim?”

“Tom.”

“Close enough.”

Tom huffed. “Look, Father—”

“He won’t be back before tomorrow,” he said finally, “but I’ll be sure to tell him you dropped by. Now, if you don’t mind, peace and the Lord be with you, and fuck off.” With that, Father Leslie slammed shut the door to the priory.

Cursing the priest under his breath, Tom turned back down the narrow street that ran off the main marketplace. On a bright Saturday afternoon, the crowds were thick and the smells in the air even thicker. He couldn’t pass the fishmonger’s stall without helping himself to a bag of periwinkles, eating a handful on the way back to the estate and pricking his fingers clumsily with the pin as he went. It was worth it, though. Absolutely worth it.

The smell of the sea lingered on his fingers as he strolled his way alongside the river. A tributary of the Thames, it flowed smoothly along the south face of the estate, glittering under the sun. He followed it eastward, through the densest of the woodland and out into the open until it met the path that led to the foreyard. It was then, as the manor house came back into his view, just short of the old sawmill and weir, that he saw the Schofields on the other side of the river.

He recognised Sir and Lady Schofield, but only by the description Jean had gave; George, a tall, nervous-looking man with blond woolly hair beginning to recede, and Phyllis, a petite woman of ample stature with a kind, maternal face. Everyone else, currently involved in a tame game of cricket, he knew nothing of.

It was then, on the outside of his peripheral vision, that a cricket ball was whacked right into the river with a satisfying _splash_.

Tom raised a hand and shouted over, “I’ll get it!” already beginning to pull off his boots and shirt. He kept on his undershirt and trousers, mindful of the children present, and dived into the water. It was cold. Colder than expected. Deeper, too. He let the current drag him along as he snatched up the ball and clung to the bank. Above him, he could hear the children among them cheering, the women fussing, and Sir Schofield’s valet, who Jean called simply Hepburn, saying, “Right, let’s get you up, lad. There you are.”

He was pulled, with an effort, from the stream and onto the grass. For the most part, Hepburn held him steady, and he clutched to his shoulder in return.

“Bloody hell,” he breathed, “that’s colder than it looks.”

“And to whom do we owe thanks for such heroics?” asked a lady to his left.

“Thomas Blake, m’lady,” he said, beginning to chitter. He wasn’t freezing, but the shock of it had seized his body tight, stringing him out ready to snap. “ _Christ_.”

“Mr Thomas,” perked up a voice—a child’s voice—asking, “may we have our ball back?”

Tom stepped away from Hepburn towards a small girl in a summer dress. Though he doubted his ability to rise to his feet again, he knelt before her and offered out the soaking wet cricket ball. She took it with a brave hand and Tom smiled, struggling upright once more. She whispered her thanks shyly over the top of the ball and turned back to her mother, as if her boldness had suddenly run its course.

“Take the boy inside,” Sir Schofield yelled over to Hepburn, pointing towards the house. “Get him a towel.”

“Come, lad,” said Hepburn, “let’s get you dried off.”

*

In the entry hall of Kinross House, Tom stood dripping water on the marble floor.

The inside, as he might have expected, was of a much more flamboyant character than the outside. The plasterwork was stylish, the wallpaper garish. Every inch of available wall seemed to be taken up by the solemn portrait of a face Tom didn’t recognise. If he were able to decorate his walls so finely, he thought, he would not have something so dull. It just seemed a waste.

It was as he wandered along the hall, up the stairs, that he noticed a man watching him from the morning room. It was a bright, white, sparsely decorated room in which the man sat on a high back armchair, slouched low in the seat. His head turned gently on the axis of his stare, pale blue eyes almost lost in his feverish complexion.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

Finally, a warmth returned to Tom, but not in a way he felt could be deemed entirely appropriate.

“Yeah,” he answered. “Just went for a little swim, is all.”

The man turned his head towards the window flooding the room with light. Tom watched the way the sunshine settled on the apple of his cheek and cleared his throat. It was obscene, he thought, to look such a way.

“And why did you go for a swim?”

Tom grinned and told him, “To fetch a cricket ball.” His eyes trailed down the man. He seemed as though he had dressed to join his family but didn’t quite make it out the door. “Do you enjoy it? Cricket? I don’t. Not really. More of a football man, myself. West Ham, specifically. Can’t really spare a shilling for games most of the time but—” He stopped himself, catching the other man’s bewilderment. “Sorry.”

Then, the man rose from his seat. He seemed to float across the floor in his plimsolls.

“We should get you a change of clothes before you catch a chill,” he said, beginning towards the staircase.

Tom looked over his shoulder to where Hepburn had disappeared down to the basement in search of a servant’s towel. He should stay put, he knew wisely, but there was much more fun in being foolish. He had tried to teach Joseph as much and was nothing if not a man of his word. Hoisting his boots and shirt close to his chest, he began to follow the other man up the stairs, trying mightily careful not to slip in his wet socks.

“Forgive me,” the man said, finally stopping on the third floor, “I don’t think I caught your name.”

“Tom,” he replied. Just Tom. “And you?”

“William.”

 _William_. It suited him, he thought, following him the rest of the way to his room. Like the morning room, it wasn’t particularly decadent but for the trinkets of china that lined the fireplace. It seemed an act below his place to fetch trousers and a shirt from his wardrobe, but Tom made no move to stop him even when he disappeared and returned with a towel a moment later. He laid them out neatly on the end of his bed.

“I’ll give you some privacy,” William said then.

He stepped outside before Tom could insist that he needn’t bother.

*

“You seem—”

Joseph looked at him, gentle and bleary. They were at a pub in the village, hidden beneath smoke and drowned out by ditties. Around them sons of Irishmen drank and sang of revenge for Skibbereen. Most of them, Joseph told him, were his parishioners, and on their way to the bar they called him Father.

For as long as Tom could remember, Joseph had wanted to be a priest. He had been a child when Joseph, nine years older, began passing the evenings he returned from the coal pit by studying the Psalms in the corner of the room by candlelight. The Book of Psalms, the only book they seemed to own, was given to him by a Jesuit missionary named Father O’Dowda, and by the time Tom was old enough to read it for himself, the pages had turned black under Joseph’s hand. God had called for him soon after.

Though he worked on a coal pit as a child, Joseph had never gone down a mine. He kicked and screamed and seared away the grot on his cheeks with his tears in protest. It was his biggest fear. When Tom learned of the mining accident that had killed his father, it too became his.

Afterdamp, they called it.

He often wondered what it felt like to suffocate on air.

“You seem far away,” Joseph eventually finished, waggling an accusing finger at Tom. “What do you need to tell me, Tommy boy?”

Tom sank the rest of his pint and wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. There was plenty he needed to tell him, but very little that he wanted to. He cocked his head to the side. “Don’t I have to make an appointment for that?”

His brother reached out, clamping a hand on the back of his neck. He shook him slightly, as though checking for life.

“No,” he said, “not you.”

*

In a minute’s walk from the main house, the path of grass and gravel diverged from the river and down to the walled garden contained in the old stable courtyard. The area was overgrown, and the planked door at the entry of the garden was precarious on its hinges.

It was on the highest wall to the north that Tom was fixing a panelled wire trellis, twisted into shape by his own hand. It had been a request of Lady Schofield, who was looking to return the walled garden back to its former glory. As summer crept closer, Tom could think of nothing better than to shelter in the shade of the woodlands to work on something that was not the tedious pruning of trees or watering of plants. He wasn’t just a glorified gardener, after all.

Then, from behind himself, he heard a voice.

“You look much…dryer today.”

Tom did not feel dry. Sweat gathered on his upper lip and temple, plastering his hair to his skin. He pushed it from his forehead with his wrist as he turned, hammer swinging clumsily by his face as he moved. He smiled down at Will, who had sat himself down on an old iron bench with the engraving _periissem ni periissem_ along the back. _I would have perished had I not persisted_. He’d had Joseph translate it for him a few days before when he’d found the same words written into the stonework of his cottage. It was probably a family motto, he’d said.

“A fair assessment,” he said, nodding. “If you’ve come back for your clothes, I ‘aven’t gotten around to washing them yet.” He paused, taking a step closer. “Though I did like them trousers. Might keep ‘em, if I’m honest.”

“You’ll need to take them up at the end,” Will said in return, which, _ouch_. At once, Will’s face tightened. “I’m not disturbing you, am I?”

“Actually,” Tom began, dropping his hammer into the foliage and rubbing his hands down the front of his trousers, “I was just about to have lunch.” He retrieved his sandwiches from where they sat on an upturned barrel, wrapped in a cloth that he absolutely _must_ return to Mrs Rowe. “Besides, this is your estate, ain’t it? You can come and go where and when you please.”

Will smiled politely, chin pointed to his chest. “Even if that were so,” he said, “I’d hate to be a nuisance.”

Impossible, he thought, and took a seat beside Will. “Sandwich?”

Tom was quietly relieved when Will shook his head over his shoulder. He was sat forward in his seat, backside resting on the edge as though he was poised to run. Something about him ticked between mellow and flighty, and it reminded Tom, no matter how hard he tried to forget it, of those months that Joseph had spent at home after returning from France. It was like his body would fidget and twitch on its own accord, fighting against invisible restraints, all the while his eyes were set perpetually on the middle distance, mind existing between reality and whatever hell he’d come back from.

He wanted to ask Will if he’d gone to war, but he didn’t. He knew better.

Tom turned his face up as he ate, squinting against the sunlight splitting through the trees. It seemed, despite all their beauty, they concealed an ancient melancholy, trapping something sad and tender from the outside world. In the silence and subtle breeze, Tom felt it, and he wondered, lowering his eyes to Will once more, how many climbing roses they thought it would take to make a difference.

*

It was the next night, after dusk had fallen, that Will turned up again. Tom was sat at the table writing a letter to his mother when a knock came at the door. He crossed the floor, candle in hand, and pulled back the door an inch to see who it was. When he recognised Will’s face, alive in the orange glow against the dark, he opened the door and stepped aside.

Will brushed against him as he passed, setting his skin and bones afire. 

Jesus fucking Christ, he thought, eyes automatically ticking over to a picture of the Immaculate Heart of Mary he had nailed to a cupboard door in what he assumed to be Joseph’s honour, thought he wasn’t quite sure. Beside it was a picture of his own mother, taken not long before he’d gone to France. She had wept like the Virgin when she seen it, fingers brushing their faces, asking where the time had gone, and what had it done with her babies. 

Shaking his head free of the memory, he latched his eyes onto Will’s small, tentative movements around the cottage. He kept close to the fire though the night was mild and he already wore a jumper. Setting the candle aside, he touched Will’s arm as he went to move past him. He knelt and threw more kindling onto the fire and watched it rise. Looking over his shoulder, he asked, “Better?”

Will nodded wordlessly.

“Not a chatty one, are ya,” Tom said as he rose back to his full height. “Well, you’ll be happy to know I got them clothes washed.” He pinged the clothesline above him, causing Will’s shirt to flutter near his head. “I reckon they’ll be dry soon enough.”

Will reached out, running his fingers over his own shirt. “Thank you,” he said. “You needn’t have.”

“Nonsense,” he said, and returned to the table. “What was you doing out here, then?”

“Just out for a walk.”

“At this time?” he asked.

Will moved in a small circle. “I can come and go when and where I please, can’t I?” he said, to which Tom grinned.

“I suppose you can.”

It was then, slowly and without expression, that Will crossed the small room and sat down on the edge of Tom’s bed. He had the look of man about to be judged before his Maker, pale face a perfect canvas for the flickering light to dance upon. Tom curled a fist in his lap and bounced his knee. Where his dear mother had been in his thoughts had now been commandeered by Will, and the letter on the table lay forgotten.

Without knowing, he moved to join him.

He sat close, watching Will as he watched the fire. His face was averted, and he breathed as though it took effort or thought. If I don’t touch him, Tom thought, I’ll surely go mad. So he did. He put out a hand and laid his fingers on the exposed skin of his neck.

At his touch, Will quivered, but he did not move away.

“Why did you come here?” he asked, marvelling in the way Will’s hair split through his fingers as he pushed them upwards. “To me?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do,” he said, though he couldn’t really be sure. Will was little better than a stranger to him. He did not know him, who he was, what he felt, what he thought. He knew only want he wanted to believe from the reality in which he operated. And that was this: Will in his bed in the middle of night, sat waiting for something he could not articulate. “Don’t ya?”

Will nodded and turned his head until Tom’s hand cupped his cheek.

Tom’s thumb caught the wet inside edge of his bottom lip. He leaned in closer, body twisted. He brought his other hand up to splay across the long column of Will’s throat, gentle, and smoothed it down and across to his shoulder. Broad shoulders, he noted, the realisation burning in his gut, close to where Will’s own hands rested, fingertips clawing at his flannel shirt with all the urgency and vigour of a dying man.

“I can’t,” Will said then. Tom felt it more than he heard it. “I need to go.”

And so he did. 

*

It was Father Leslie, not his brother, that usually took Mass.

Tom had not returned to St Malachy’s since his first night in the village. Though the guilt of his forsaken faith still lingered, he had not, until that Sunday, felt the need to go. And that was not to say what he felt was guilt or shame for what had happened with Will. He had alleviated his conscience of such thoughts so that it might be possible to live some time ago, if only with himself. He thought not of sins or wrongs, but the hopeless foreboding that gathered in his heart and throat.

From a pew near the back, he watched Father Leslie genuflect and finish the Last Gospel, “Et Verbum caro factum est, et habitávit in nobis: et vídimus glóriam eius, glóriam quasi Unigéniti a Patre, plenum grátiæ et veritátis.”

Tom despite himself, mumbled a, “Thanks be to God,” with the server.

The Hail Marys came in the vernacular, and Mass was over.

He stayed put as the congregation filed out, kneeling as they passed the Blessed Sacrament behind the altar. He stayed even after Father Leslie had disappeared into the sacristy, and the server had extinguished the candles on the altar and covered it accordingly. It wasn’t until Father Leslie reappeared, dressed down to his black cassock, that Tom stood. He noticed the priest holding a cigarette and lighter.

“Oh look who it is,” Father Leslie said, but he didn’t stop. “Tiny Tim.”

Ignoring the remark, Tom followed Father Leslie from the church out into the gardens to its rear. The priest had already lit the end of his cigarette by the time Tom settled against the wall beside him. Slim and sallow-skinned, like he’d just passed an illness or not quite, he stood with a slouch, dark hair standing up in wisps against the breeze as he smoked.

“Before you ask, Father Blake isn’t here, he’s doing a round of home visits,” Father Leslie said. “You know he enjoys it? It’s really rather ghoulish.”

Tom bristled, offended on his brother’s behalf. While it was true that he seemed to find special satisfaction in comforting the dying, it was that very sentiment that had led him to the Western Front; everyone had the right to be comforted and absolved, he had said before leaving, no matter where they were. If he had to travel to the furthest house in the village, he would do so. If he had to crawl on his belly over No Man’s Land, he would do exactly that. It was the principle of the thing, he had said.

“I didn’t come to see him,” he said. “Or you.”

Father Leslie took a drag from his cigarette and exhaled.

“Thank Christ.”

*

In the airless heat of July, Tom split the firewood in the shade of the house and took it to the woodshed when he was done. It was on one such occasion that, for the first time in well over a month, Will appeared from the garden pavilion, wringing his hands as though nervous. His skin seemed to have avoided the summer’s golden kiss, though the tops of his ears and the bridge of his nose still burned an awful red.

Tom tried to seem as though he hadn’t noticed him, but it was difficult. Despite everything, he still wanted to look. He still wanted to talk.

“Suppose I should say thanks,” he said, throwing the heavy canvas over the woodshed, “for not telling your father about the happenings in my cottage.” He tied down a corner. “Men have got the sack for much less, I’m sure you know.”

“Do you think it in me to tell such a thing?” he asked with a frown.

“If you wanted rid of me,” Tom said, crouching by the next corner. “It would only be my word against yours.”

Will leaned against the wall where he stood, looking away and tucking his arms over his chest, protective. “You don’t seem to have a mightily high opinion of me,” he said.

“I don’t have much of an opinion of you at all,” he said, straightening up, “and I doubt you should be concerning yourself with the opinions of my likes even if I did. It ain’t the way of things.”

He made to move past him, but Will reached out and closed his hand gently on his upper arm, stopping him and drawing him close. He looked down and swore the very bones of this man’s hand were designed to stir something mad inside him. He laid his hand over his, keeping it in place, suddenly filled with a strange fright at the thought of him letting go.

“It didn’t seem to stop you before,” he said, quiet.

Tom laughed and bit his lip. It wasn’t possible for his face to grow redder or his skin to burn hotter, so it kindled elsewhere inside of him, starting at his knees and rising to his chest. He moved his hand to take Will’s within it, curling his fingers tight around his and guiding it to his chest, over his heart. Without the need of further direction, Will splayed his fingers, and Tom thought, if he weren’t such a prudish boy of his class, he’d have the right mind to go lower.

For what seemed to be the first time, they looked each other in the eye.

“There’s a fair in the village,” Tom said, peeling his hand from him. “If you’d like—”

“Yes.”

Tom let out a small, content noise of surprise and began to walk backwards, swooping to pick up his splitting maul as he went. “Then I shall meet you at the gate piers after dinner,” he said, accidentally tripping over a stray piece of kindling, but it only served to make Will laugh, and he quite enjoyed the sound.

*

Will did not get out much. Tom had been told as much by Mrs Rowe, who lamented his reclusiveness, saying, “He would always come down to the kitchen as a boy, poking around and asking daft questions. It’s a sin what that war did to him—a bleeding sin, I tell ya.”

It was of no surprise to Tom to learn for definite that Will had fought in the Great War. He wore it like a coat, sodden and heavy on his shoulders, and his silences screamed of the horror and humiliation of it all. Tom himself had seen little of the war. In fear of leaving their mother childless, Joseph had forbidden him to enlist—and almost gotten himself killed, likely to prove a point, the bastard—but he’d been conscripted near the end anyway, trained up and sent to France to stand in a reserve trench and survey the devastation from afar.

But he was not to think about that.

He stood by Mr Smith’s lodge, at the gate piers as promised, waiting. A thin thread of smoke rose from the chimney and there was a gentle glow from within, but the gardener did not notice or care to come out and greet him. No matter, he thought, rocking back and forth on his heels, though the distraction would have been nice.

Not ten minutes later, he watched Will rushing towards him down the path, flushed, as though he had escaped the house and feared of being dragged back. He apologised, panting, frantic and charming. If he was a woman, he thought, he would take his arm and they would walk together entwined. As it was, they walked close, hands in their pockets so as not to accidentally touch. What a pity it was, with all the affection and love the world had been drained of, sunk in blood over France and Flanders, that they were not to add to it out of fear.

“May I ask why a groundskeeper?” Will asked as they stopped at a curb to let lorries from the ironworks rattle past.

“I’m good at it. And I like being outside, always have, and there was plenty of work like it back home. On the farms and estates and that. Practically left school to start pruning trees and the like,” he explained. “It’s hard work, but it’s better than going down a pit.” He paused. “Them things will just finish off blokes like me that the war couldn’t.”

Will hummed, but he seemed somewhere distant.

“And do you miss it?” he asked after a moment of silence. “Home?”

“I miss mum and the dogs,” he told him truthfully. “Raised me and my brother in one room, my mum did, before she got compensation from the pit. Bought up a nice little place with the money. She even got her own little orchard. Loves them cherry trees, so she does.”

“Are there any cherry trees on the grounds?”

Tom pursed his lips, thinking. He could already hear the distant raucous of the fair.

“Not that I can think of.”

“Then we should see to fixing that,” he said, walking on as Tom stopped in his tracks. He turned, quirking up a brow. “Aren’t you coming?”

Tom would come when he regained his composure. As of then, he could think only of kissing Will. He would give all he had or ever might have just to hold him in his arms and kiss him at that very moment, the world around them be damned. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t have given for the simple pleasure, like it had suddenly become a necessity and life would not continue without it.

*

Naked only to his hips, Tom washed himself round the back of the cottage.

He was humming to himself, crouched by a tin bath of soapy water and running a washcloth over the back of his neck when he heard a noise. Pressing the water from his eyes and giving his head a shake, he turned to find a finely dressed young woman standing by the side of his house. He near enough had a heart attack.

“Holy mother of Christ,” he cursed, dropping his washcloth and scrambling to reach for his shirt. “M’lady, forgive me, I wasn’t expectin’—”

“No, I don’t suppose you were,” she said sweetly, voice moving behind him. “Tom Blake, isn’t it?”

Having finished buttoning his shirt, he finally turned to face her, finding her perched on a stool, legs crossed over neatly. Though not as alike as he and his brother, the kinship between this woman and Will was undeniable in their features. He figured it was his sister, Lottie, who he only knew was two years Will’s senior and had married a locomotive engineer in favour of a man with a title, much to her parents’ distress. He pulled his braces back up over his shoulder before he spoke.

“It is,” he said. “Are you in need of any help?”

“Do I look like I need help?” she asked, to which Tom didn’t dare answer. “No,” she continued, sweeping something from her skirt, “I just came to see the man whom my brother spoke so fondly of in his letters.”

Tom’s head rung like a church bell.

He cleared his throat.

“And?”

“I thought you’d be chattier.”

When Lottie smiled, her eyes sparkled like the stars that hung over the trees at night. They had the same eyes, her and Will. With a peculiar sadness, Tom wondered if his eyes had shone the same before the war, or if they had always been so perpetually melancholy and only now their disillusion was justified.

“Sorry to disappoint,” he said.

“No need for that,” she said, “but I would very much like to hear one of your famous stories over dinner.”

“Dinner? In the house?” He furrowed his brow, thinking her a mad woman. “M’lady, with all due respect, I don’t live in the basement of that house but that don’t mean I ain’t one of your father’s servants. A place at that table ain’t my place.”

She did not relent, though he suspected she knew he resented her upper-class impudence of getting her own way. It was innate, after all, and as much as she craved the humanity of his class, she could not begin to understand or imagine the chains that held him there and would continue to do so 'til he died. Only then, he thought, would he escape the system. Only then would they be equal.

“Not as my father’s servant, but as my brother’s friend,” she tried.

He declined once more.

“Very well,” she said, standing from the stool. “If that’s what pleases you.”

“Not what pleases me, m’lady, just the way of things is all it is.”

*

Instead, that evening, Tom went to have dinner at the priory.

He ate his soup, thickened with potatoes, as Father Leslie barely touched his and Joseph took no bowl at all. In its place, a stack of letters and files lay before him. He studied them with his usual attentiveness, chewing on the end of a pencil that left tiny flecks of paint on his lips. If Joseph wasn’t careful, he would end up with the lead poisoning he so often warned him against, Tom thought. He reminded him of as much, and Joseph wiped the paint from his mouth.

“What are you looking at, anyway?” he asked, not because he particularly cared, but because the silence was beginning to unnerve him.

“Your brother is looking to tear down asylums as Odoacer tore down Rome,” Father Leslie told him before his brother could speak. He was sat back in his chair, arms crossed and a drink in his hand. “Believes a little fresh air and faith cures a madman, your brother.”

Tom looked at his brother, who shifted in his seat.

For all that he had suffered, and the problems he presented, it was never an option to send Joseph away. Their mother would have sooner gotten herself locked up in one of those ghastly places than send him there, she had always said. It was faith, yes, that had aided him, but his family above all. Joseph knew that. He had told them exactly that, holding their mother’s hand in his own. To be at home and be busy was not a cure, but it was a comfort, and by God those asylums provided none of that.

“Those places,” he said curtly, then stopped. “Those places are as void of humanity as they are as void of God. And we live by them silently.”

Sat between the bickering priests, Tom thought of Will. He thought of his quiet, muted nature and wondered what they might have done to him, or if they had just hidden him from the world, because God knows that house was big enough.

“And what will we do with them then?” Father Leslie asked.

“Love them as the Lord and Saint Vincent instructed,” he said, then looked at Tom, his jaw tightening as it did when he wept. “Love them as my family loved me.”

*

That following week, Tom went to fetch milk from the parlour, and when he returned, Will was sat by the door of his cottage. He sat with his knees to his chest, his spirit dim and absent as though he was there only in body, not thought. It was only when Tom stood in front of him, moving the bottle of milk under his arm, that Will looked up to see him.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello, you,” he returned, and drew him up by the hand.

He led him inside and shut the door. It was cool and dark. Tom put the milk in the pantry cabinet and lit the lamp on the table before turning back to Will. It always struck him low in his stomach how handsome he was, how his romanticised memory simply paled in comparison. Should he have had the means to take a picture, he would have captured him in this very moment; angelic, almost, in his white shirt and cream braces, with his hair aloft and skin set aglow in the flickering light. What a beauty, he thought. What a fucking beauty.

Will came to him slowly, a half step at a time. When he was close enough, Tom reached out to run his hands down his flanks. How strange it was, he marvelled, to feel beauty as well as see it. And then he felt a soft, wide hand touching his face, Will’s breath hot on his skin as he at last laid a kiss on his cheek.

They both stood motionless, in a sort of dream, until Tom tilted his head back.

“You ain’t gonna run out on me this time, are ya?” he asked, digging his fingers into the flesh of Will’s waist.

He said nothing, only kissed him.

It was a strange kiss. Gentle and sexless and lasting only for a moment, it was so unlike Tom had ever been kissed before. He moved his hands, groping soft and clumsy over Will’s thighs and backside, feeling the build of him, the strength of him, dragging his body closer as they kissed again. This time, the searing ache of his longing freed itself from his gut, and for once, _for once_ , he felt weightless. He felt content.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, pulling away. Above his clothes, he touched Will all over. He peered up at his face when his hands reached his collarbones. “You ain’t sorry, are ya?” he asked.

“No! Are you?”

“Only for not doing it sooner,” he said. He ran his hands down his arms. He couldn’t stop touching him. “Been thinking about it my whole life.”

Will smiled fondly at his exaggeration and leaned down to kiss him once more.

*

In a small clearing, Mr Smith had planted a straight line of cherry trees either side of the path. Bare, young, delicate little things, the highest of their branches reached no further skyward than Tom’s waist. Still, they were marvellous.

“I wrote to Bishop Erinmore the other day,” Joseph told him as he ran his finger along the edge of a scraggly branch as they walked. “I’m going to take some leave, go home, see mum.”

Tom trod through his guilt, thinking of his mother. He wrote to her frequently and kept her replies safely tucked inside the fold of his wallet, but he had not returned to see her since taking up the job at Kinross. Time had not afforded him the opportunity for it, but his conscience could not be told. He suspected Joseph’s motives for returning home were quite as selfless, if only from the weary gleam in his eyes and the waves of his hair growing out into curls and greying at the temple. Sometimes a man merely needed his mother.

“She’d like that,” he said, though they both knew well enough. “Miss her something awful, so I do. We should—”

“Blake!”

At once, Tom turned to the voice of Sir Schofield. He was walking with his wife down the path, from the direction of the walled garden he and Mr Smith had not long since finished. Lady Schofield was rather pleased with the results, or so he’d been told.

“Sir! M’lady!” he said, tidying himself. “Good afternoon! This is my brother, Father Joseph Blake.”

They introduced themselves and Joseph, like a proper gentleman, made a slight bow to her ladyship. It made Lady Schofield turn pink, her head lowering shyly, at which Tom almost laughed. He just about stopped himself, his teeth sunk down into his lip and Joseph’s elbow grazing warningly against his side. He would be sure to tease him about it later.

“A vicar?” the Lady said, almost girlishly. “We attend St. John’s, do you know it?”

“No, I—” Joseph threw Tom the pointed, desperate look of a man that was about to be drowned. “I’m a priest at St. Malachy’s.”

“Oh, isn’t that a—”

 _Catholic Church_. She couldn’t even get the words out of her mouth and went pinker in the wake of her realisation. Suddenly, she seemed less inclined to jump his brother’s bones, and more inclined to spit on him.

“What a queer feeling,” Sir Schofield spoke then, “to have a papist priest walking in one’s private grounds.”

Tom cringed inwardly at the word, still finding its hostile intent a lashing to his back. He did not dare to spare a look at his brother, for he knew if he were to find him as offended as he felt then he would certainly be unable to keep his mouth shut. Instead, he kept his eyes by his own feet, hands squeezed tightly together behind his back. If things were to hang any longer, he thought, he might break a finger or two.

Joseph spoke not of his offence taken, but an apology. “I’m sorry, Sir. I’ll be on my way.”

“You will do well to see to it,” he said in return, eyes on Tom then. “Need I remind you, Mr Blake, you are not paid to give tours of the grounds, but to maintain them.”

“Very good, Sir,” he said, teeth gritting together in his mouth. It was only once they watched Sir and Lady Schofield disappear down the path towards the house that Tom hissed a, “What a fucking cunt of a man, he is,” and ignored Joseph’s protestations. “I’ve half a mind to tell him where to stick his fucking job.” And what I’ve been up to with his son, he thought but did not say, if only for Joseph’s sake.

“And what good would that do?” Joseph said. “You promised me you’d stay out of trouble.”

Tom grumbled.

“You shouldn’t let people talk to you like that,” he said as they continued walking, this time towards the closest gate, in the opposite direction of the house. “I know you’ve to, what, turn the other cheek and that, but it ain’t right, Joe. It ain’t right.”

Joseph shrugged.

“I’ve been called worse,” he said. “The asylum manager down in Cholsey called me an incense huffer. I quite appreciated the creativity.”

Tom cracked a smile despite himself.

*

Tom shared nothing of his dealings with Will’s father with Will himself. He let it rumble in the distance like the ironworks beyond the trees, ignoring it in favour of pressing him to the wall of his cottage and pinning him with a kiss. Will melted against it, his hands held out by his sides, unsure where to touch, unsure where to settle. To Tom, it seemed apparent that no inch of him was out of bounds, but Will had been raised a gentleman, and gentlemen needed to be told.

He took Will’s hands and encouraged them to curl around his braces. Will ran his thumbs over the material, looking down as though in a trance. “Hey,” he whispered then, tilting his chin up, “where are you?” he asked. “Where are you? It’s no fun if you ain’t here.”

“Can I just—”

Will’s hands moved then, traveling round to his back to curl his fingers ever so tightly into the fabric of Tom’s shirt. He tucked his face into the curve of Tom’s neck, breathing in deeply. Oh, Tom thought, shuddering against the damp warmth of it. _Oh_. He let his hand travel up to the back of Will’s head, cradling it, fingers carding through his hair. He pressed own face against the broadness of his shoulder and held him.

And they stood there and never moved until Tom could hold on no longer.

He pulled his head away and looked at Will properly. He looked here. He looked present. “There you are,” he said and kissed the side of his face. Gentle, like the first one. He kissed his face all over until he laughed, shying away from the attention. “I’ve found you,” he repeated, nose to his cheek. “There you are.”

“Here I am.”

*

To have Will in the light of day was a rare treat.

He often wondered what Will did all day, holed up in that house, sneaking to his cottage only after dinner when he was sure he would not be caught. He didn’t ask, though. He thought better than to ask, no matter how much he wanted to.

It was strange, then, that as he was filling a sack with gravel by the stable courtyard, that Will appeared. He looked flushed, as though he had run there. It was rather endearing.

“I saw you from the house,” he panted, “and I just thought I’d—what are you doing?”

“Going to fill some rat holes,” he said from where he knelt, tying the sack with a thin rope. He looked around. At the other side of the yard, Cooke, a blacksmith from the village that came to shoe the horses, was speaking to Rossi, who worked in the milking parlour. He adjudged them too far away and engrossed in their own conversation to hear. “Would you like to join me?”

Will nodded and Tom grinned, rising to his feet, swinging the sack, with some difficulty, over his shoulder and picking up a shovel.

It was a short walk to the field in which Tom had found the rat holes in that morning. Bastarding rats, he’d thought, remembering those nights in the trenches when he’d feel their horrible little feet crawl over him as he tried to sleep. He’d heard a funny story about a rat once, how it bit the ear off a man. He thought about telling it to Will, but he stopped himself once more. There was no talking of the war. Not to Will, not to anyone. Tom regularly wondered if they forgot all about it, they would be doomed to repeat it. He had to hope not, but it wasn’t like the men that took those decisions had ever set foot in France themselves.

They had won, but at what senseless, humiliating cost.

Tom dropped the sack where he was.

“I would’ve thought this a job for the gamekeeper,” Will said idly. He sat on the grass with his legs out in front of him, crossed at the ankle. “I’m not going to distract you, am I?”

“No, I reckon not,” he said, turning his face skyward, feeling the sun beat down upon him. Without thought, he shrugged his braces from his shoulders and began to unbutton his shirt. He looked back down at Will, who suddenly seemed to find the birch trees to his left so interesting. “You don’t mind, do you?” he teased, pausing at the final button.

“You do as you wish,” he said.

“Good to know.”

He shrugged off his shirt and threw it onto Will’s lap.

Conscious that he did have a job to do, Tom averted his gaze from Will as best as he could. Will, on the other hand, had become very aware of how Tom’s breeches slipped down his loins without the aid of his braces, and Tom found great enjoyment in catching him in the act of looking. Eventually he bristled at the embarrassment, bunched Tom’s shirt beneath his head and reclined back fully, resting peacefully in the grass.

He looked so much younger in his sleep, Tom thought as he shovelled more gravel down a hole. It seemed to him, in that moment, the single most beautiful sight in the world.

*

“— _and hoorah me boys for freedom ‘tis the rising of the moon!_ ”

It was strange, Tom often thought, how romanticised the Irish made fighting for one’s country seem through song. It was, perhaps, as Joseph theorised, because never did they go to war, but war came to them. What an honour and necessity it must be to fight for the dignity and freedom of the land on which you stood, he supposed, and not for the King and country over which he reigned.

Still, God save the King and all that.

“I’m going to head,” Tom told Joseph. He clasped his hand down on the back of his brother’s wrist for a moment before he stood. “Give mum my love.”

He left the pub, stepping out into the pleasant August night air. All was well on his short journey home until he saw the smoke rise from the chimney of his cottage in the near distance. He furrowed his brow. Had someone broken in? Had he not locked it? Had he forgotten to put out the fire? He’d certainly been in a rush to meet Joseph, so it could have slipped his mind.

When he finally reached the cottage, he opened the door quietly to find Will standing by the hob on the fire, making tea in silence. There were two cups on the table, as though he’d been expecting him. Tom hung up his cap and jacket with a smile, eyes running over the sinews of Will’s back and arms beneath his shirt as he moved, reaching for the pantry cabinet.

“Milk’s at the bottom,” he said suddenly, causing Will to jump and turn to him.

“I was just—my parents are having one of their awful parties and I need to—” He stammered though Tom’s face played no annoyance. “The door wasn’t locked so I—I thought you wouldn’t mind if I—I made tea."

“This isn’t _my_ private property,” he reminded Will as he stepped towards him and stopped. He reached around him, bumping their chests together, as he reached for the milk. “You can come and go as you please.”

“As you’ve said,” he said, fumbling slightly as Tom pressed the jug to his chest.

“Besides,” Tom said, stepping away to take a seat at the table, “if you did as I pleased, you wouldn’t ever leave this place.”

Will’s hands clutched the jug, thumb running along its curves. “Well perhaps,” he began, looking down, “I could stay tonight. My parents’ guests will certainly keep them occupied enough for my absence to go unnoticed.” He looked back up, something new in his eyes. “If it’s alright with you?”

Never in his life had he willed sleep to come to him so quickly. He dressed unabashedly into his pyjama jacket and trousers but threw up a spare sheet on the washing line to give Will a little more privacy. From his bed, he watched Will’s shadow move across the sheet from the other side, and grinned when he pulled it back. Tom’s pyjama trousers fell comically short on Will’s shins, but there was something strangely intimate about it that stirred not only in his groin, but in his chest as well.

He really was fucked.

When Will finally joined him, he took him in his arms with a whisper of goodnight and held his body against his. He clung to Will, and Will clung back, and like this they held each other until morning.

*

Tom was poking around the kitchen, just being a general nuisance on his lunch hour, when Mrs Rowe said, “The strangest thing happened this morning. I was minding me own business when who comes downstairs? Our William.” Tom fumbled with the spoons he was messing around with at the mention of Will’s name; Jean shot him a look. “Came down and asked, bold as brass, if we could have lemon curd trifle for dessert tonight. Hasn’t asked me for that since he was a boy, so he hasn’t.”

“I wonder what’s got him so chipper all of a sudden,” Jean thought aloud, leaning on the countertop. “I saw him sitting out in the garden just yesterday.”

“I wonder,” Tom echoed, though he could think of a few reasons.

*

He woke up and, from where he was tucked on Will’s chest, looked at the light. They had forgotten to draw the curtains. He had been much too preoccupied the night before, he remembered as he listened to the blackbirds and thrushes call on him to get up, smiling at the memory. He peeled himself from Will and sat up, watching him curl subconsciously into himself to replace the heat Tom had taken from him. He touched a hand to his sleeping face, unable to help himself.

“It can’t be morning,” Will mumbled as he roused under his touch.

Tom stroked his fingers through his hair. “It’s my hour for rising, not yours,” he told him. “Go back to sleep.”

He slipped out of bed with his back to Will, disappeared to the privy and returned to fetch his clothes that hung over the back of a chair. He was faintly aware, as he fixed himself a breakfast of porridge, that Will had not gone back to sleep, but just lay there quite still, watching. He watched him in return as he sat down to eat, picking the husks from his teeth and lining them on the tablecloth like soldiers.

“Must you go?” Will asked.

“Only if I want to keep my job,” he said, but stood and came towards him anyway. “When did you become such a pest?” he asked playfully, gripping the sheet and pulling it off Will. “I thought I was supposed to be the nuisance.”

“Perhaps your rubbing off on me,” he offered.

“That,” Tom said, eyeing every slender, muscular inch of Will, “just sounds like wishful thinking on your part.”

Will blushed a deep pink down his neck as Tom began to crawl over him, catching the backs of his knees with the crooks of his elbows and hitching them up as he went. Bending his head down, he kissed the centre of his chest and then rubbed his cheek against it, humming as he felt Will’s hand grab blindly at his backside to pull him closer. Maybe one day they would become so close, so embroiled in each other, that they would never part, and the thumping beat of Will’s heart beneath his cheek would marry to his and they would surely die together of a broken heart.

Tom turned his face up, chin resting in the valley of Will’s sternum.

“I never thanked you,” he said, “for getting Mr Smith to plant those cherry trees. It’ll be a few years before they start producing fruit, but it’ll look like it’s been snowing soon enough.”

Will ran his fingers backwards through Tom’s hair like a bone comb.

“Like it’s been snowing?” he mused.

“Yeah, beautiful, it is.” He pursed his lips, thinking of home. “I better be off.”

Finally, he drew back, letting Will’s legs come gently down onto the mattress once more. He sat back on his own heels, looking down over him, giving his ankle an absent caress. Yes, he thought, one day it would be like this forever.

*

Only, likely, it wouldn’t be. Tom was reminded of as much as he spoke with Will in the garden, taking a break from levelling out in the gravel paths. Will had been reading fitfully, noticeably bothered by something, and it took all of Tom’s irritating nagging to get out of him.

“Mother has invited this girl, a French diplomat’s daughter, to her next silly party. She’s trying to orchestrate a romance.”

Tom leaned upon the handle of his rake.

“You’ll have to marry eventually,” he said. “Why not…give it a go.”

Will seemed confused, and Tom didn’t blame him. Homosexuality, it seemed to him, was an upper-class occupation, forever accompanied by the aesthetic virtues of their acts and art. They understood themselves too much and sought as certain of an existence as possible, refusing to live in the grey reality of the common man who fucked men, married women and remained behind the shroud of masculinity society had ever so kindly afforded them. 

It was, after all, Tom’s perceived _maleness_ that had kept him out of trouble thus far. To be found out, one had to be looked for, and no one was looking at Tom.

No one but Will, who looked up at him with such distress he felt it bleed into his own bones.

“It wouldn’t upset you?” he asked.

It would tear his heart out and drive him mad, but the world had not been designed to accommodate such complexities of the heart and body. Joseph had once said the same of his celibacy, though he was bound by discipline, not nature. Tom turned where he stood and looked out onto the river. He felt himself grow upset it in the hollow of his stomach and the back of his throat, and wished suddenly, above anything else, that Will would hug him.

But he couldn’t. Not here. Another sad fact of the matter.

“I don’t _want_ to share you with no one,” he said truthfully, turning back to Will. “But it’s not about what I want.”

Will held his gaze for a long, quiet moment before dropping his head. He ran his thumbs along the cover of his book before clutching it so firmly in his hands the muscles of his arms quivered from the strain. He looked as though he might cry.

“A quite sorry state of affairs it is to be in, don’t you think?” he asked sadly.

Finally, Tom let his rake fall and he sat beside Will. He dared not wrap an arm around him and hold him close, so he rested a hand over his, not quite able to cover it, and linked their fingers together. Like this they sat, and like this they stayed.

*

“I though the Father’s house was always supposed to be open?” Tom called out as he watched Father Leslie approach the church from the priory, keys in hand. “The Anglican church down the street is open.”

“Yeah, well, no one’s stopping you going there,” Father Leslie said as he climbed up the last of the stairs to the front door. “And I’ve been inside that place.” He paused to push open the heavy planked doors. “They’ve nothing worth fucking stealing.”

Tom walked inside after Father Leslie, sitting himself down in a pew as the priest lit a few lamps on the walls, illuminating the inside of the church in a haunting glow. Not even the moonlight shone down through the stained glass windows, lost somewhere behind the clouds for the night, and it only seemed to add to the sorrow on the Virgin’s face as she lost the Child Jesus in the Temple, received His body in her arms and watched His body be placed in the tomb. Tom’s eyes were still fixed where Mary wept as Father Leslie sat beside him.

“So,” he said, “what is it? You’ve killed a man? You want to come home to the Church? You’re an atheist Bolshevik now and you’re here to burn this place down and start a class war?”

“I’m not starting no class war and I ain’t killed nobody neither, Christ,” Tom said, shaking his head. “I just…I just came here to talk is all.”

Father Leslie raised an eyebrow at him.

“You know, if you talk to God, you’re praying, but when God talks to you, you’re suddenly a madman—or worse, a priest.”

“Why’d you become a priest if you can’t be bothered with it?” he asked.

“Because for some unknown reason I believe in all of this,” he offered, throwing his arms forward towards where the Blessed Sacrament sat beyond the altar. “And it is as the Lord said to Saint Peter what would be done; that there will come a day when you will be led to a place you do not want to go, through duty, but depart unto a place of glory due to you in return.”

“For your own salvation, then,” he said.

Father Leslie nodded profoundly.

“Everyone else is lying.”

*

“What is she like?” Tom asked, coming up behind Will. “The French lass.”

He reached around his front, beginning to unbutton his shirt with a blind hand. Flat against him, he felt Will’s entire body shiver and stiffen at the physical intimacy it hadn’t yet grown accustomed to. What a pitying shame it was, he thought, that something so beautiful should be without an affectionate touch for so long, and what a great pleasure it was to rectify it.

By his sides, Will’s hands hung idle, resisting none of it.

“Tom—”

“What’s she like?” he repeated, pulling Will’s shirt back off his shoulders.

“She’s very…intelligent.” Tom pressed his nose to Will’s neck, feeling him speak, feeling him swallow. “And beautiful. In an ethereal way. Like flowers are.”

“Yeah? What else?”

Tom ran his hands over Will’s quivering belly, marvelling at how it jumped from his delicate touch, settling into a tight concave. He hummed against his shoulder blade as he smoothed his hands over his flanks, gripping tight, before swooping them back down to thumb over the coarse hair above his groin. Finally, he rolled his own hips forward as his fingers unfastened Will’s trousers, feeling a flame of heat at the root of his own back begin to lick down into his loins.

“Tom—”

“What else?” he insisted, tucking one hand further down into Will’s trousers as the other clamped to his hip, keeping him close. “Beautiful and intelligent and what, Will?”

Will spoke nothings to the fireplace beyond them, fighting against Tom’s grasp to push himself forward.

“Will…”

“Polite! She’s so polite.”

Now somewhat satisfied, he took mercy and lifted his hand from Will, spat in his open palm and retuned it. A new shudder came, starting from Will’s shoulders and traveling downwards until his knees shook. Mouthing his own stream of consciousness against the other man’s spine, Tom tried to keep him up, moving his arm to wrap around his middle, where he was at his most narrow, and hitched him up against himself.

He rubbed his forehead into the ridges of his spine.

“Are you going to marry her?”

“Yes! Yes, I will!”

He touched him, generous and firm, until it was over, and he was left with a curious sense of joy and wet fingers. He wiped them lazily on Will’s stomach, rubbing his sweaty cheek into the even damper centre of his back and feeling him breathe. Heavy and boneless, Will rested back against him, thoughtlessly reaching into the space between them, searching for the buttons his corduroy trousers.

“Her name’s Lauri,” he said, still panting. “You didn’t ask but—her name’s Lauri.”

“Lovely name.”

“Yeah,” Will continued, finally holding him, his arm twisted at an awkward angle, straining and quite frankly delicious in Tom’s mind. “It’s just a shame—it’s just a shame I probably won’t marry her.”

“Hand on a cock and suddenly you’ve changed your mind,” Tom breathed, trying to laugh. “Christ.”

“That,” he said, “and she seemed much more interested in my mother’s personal maid.”

He came with a laugh and inarticulate cry, smothering the sound into Will’s skin as he gave him one last stroke. He let his lips rest there, not kissing him, just breathing warm and heavy against his back until he could bring himself to straighten up again. Gently, he turned Will around by his arm and smiled madly at the sight of the rosy pinkness of Will’s cheeks. Pushing up on his toes, he pressed his nose to the torched skin there and kissed him where his lips settled.

*

“Joe?”

“Yeah?”

Tom sucked on his teeth, thinking. He was drunk. He could tell by the way Joseph seemed to spin from where he sat at the other side of the table. Still, he was doing slightly better than Father Leslie, who had long since fallen asleep in his armchair across the room.

“Do you remember dad?”

Joseph’s lips fell into a wobbly pout as he nodded his head and ran a finger along the rim of his whisky glass. Father Leslie’s whisky glass. Everything had been so off-kilter since the Pope died.

“Not very well,” he said.

It was true that he didn’t remember much of him, but whether he done so by choice or because he hadn’t, as a child, had the presence of mind to store up memories of him, Tom wasn’t sure. He remembered his bedtime kisses coming long after dark, and the lowered, muttering voice that he spoke with. He remembered him coming home and bathing in the tin basin by the fireplace, pink skin raw beneath the coal dust that settled on every inch of the one room they occupied.

Tom played with his pinkie ring.

“Do you think I would’ve turned out different if he was here?”

Joseph drank down an inch of his whisky, whispered, “I don’t know, Tom. I don’t know,” and sank his face into his arms.

“Hey,” Tom hushed, sliding across a chair towards his brother. He put a hand on his arm, on the mutilated, shrapnel-shredded skin exposed by the folded sleeve of his jumper. It was a reminder of the injustice that peace had been built on, he’d said after the death of the pontiff, and if they should not heed the next prophet of peace then another twenty million people would die. Unjust peace, after all, was as bad as war itself, for it only created more war. “Hey.”

“You know I love you, don’t you?” Joseph said as he lifted his head. His blue eyes were shining wet. “I always tried to do right by you.”

“Course I do, you idiot.”

And he did know. Of course he did. And he loved him the same way as he did him, unconditional and without reason. There wasn’t anything on God’s green earth he wouldn’t do for Joseph, nowhere he wouldn’t go, nothing he couldn’t tell him except—

“Joe?”

“Yeah?”

Tom felt the words live and die in his mouth. He shook his head. Swallowed his heart.

“Nothing,” he said, “I just love you, too.”

And then he did as he always done and laid his head on his brother’s shoulder.

*

In the corner of the room, a yellow flame licked up the chimney from the fireplace. The shadow of snowflakes falling gently from the sky travelled across the brickwork walls and floor. On top of Tom, Will lay over him like a blanket, his legs covering his to keep them warm and his cheek nuzzled to his chest. Tom, for his part, drew lazy patterns on his back and shoulders, tracing maps he’d never seen and lands he’d never been to.

“We should run away,” he said.

Will hummed and Tom felt his gentle fingers begin to stroke his rib cage.

“And where would we go?” he asked, entertaining him.

At first, he thought of France. He thought of a small farmhouse in the countryside surrounded by fields and orchards where no one would ever bother them. He thought of Spain and her sunshine and the way the sun might set over the Mediterranean. He thought of Switzerland and her blessed neutrality, untouched by war and memory. He thought of anywhere but here.

“I haven’t decided yet,” he told him. He twirled a strand of his hair around his finger. “Unless you have any suggestions?”

“I’ll go where you go,” Will said simply.

For a moment, Tom stopped the movements of his hands and simply looked down at Will. He looked at how he moved with the rise and fall of his chest and the glow from the fire accentuated the sweet slope of his nose. He looked and remembered the first time he had seen him and thought of how his stomach stirred with the same hot madness still. Had he been in love with him from that moment to this? Was that possible? He thought not, but it mattered little now. He was in love now.

Will turned his head, his chin resting uncomfortably on Tom’s sternum. It didn’t bother him.

“And when will we go?” he asked.

“Someday soon.”

**Author's Note:**

> honestly this was written to satisfy my very niche interest of catholic chaplains during wwi. i should maybe disclaim that i am a practicing catholic and any jibes at the Church's expense come from a place of love (and guilt) 
> 
> unfortunately if you were thinking 'that's quite enough of this, marco' my other interest this quarantine season is 'escape to the château diy' so i will be writing that riveting sequel of them remodeling a farmhouse and arguing over fabrics in an as yet unchosen location.
> 
> im hrrybnghm on tumblr & i hope everyone is staying as safe as houses in your houses!


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